Hey folks! I’m going to be in NYC on Thursday and wanted to invite you all to a low-key Slow Boring hangout at Bull McCabe’s on Saint Mark’s Place. Nothing formal or fancy, just show up and have a drink or two and chat and meet some folks. I’m gonna get there at 5 p.m. and hang out for a few hours. So to repeat:
Bull McCabe’s, 29 St Mark’s Place, 5 p.m., Thursday, March 10.
Come say hi! Now on to the post.
What is Vladimir Putin doing? A lot of people have answers.
One line of thought (prominently associated with John Mearsheimer) is that Russia’s approach to Ukraine is grounded in more-or-less rational security concerns about NATO expansion. I was initially inclined to agree with Mearsheimer. As I said back on March 1, expanding NATO never struck me as a very good idea. I was not a big fan of the decision to get aggressively involved in the Euromaidan protests and favored a relatively conciliatory response to Russia’s seizure of Crimea and meddling in the Donbas region. But Mearsheimer has stuck to this analysis even as Putin has dramatically escalated his own conduct, launching an invasion that has created a lot of problems for Russia even though nothing changed on the NATO front.
Others, including George Robertson and Maria Popova, argue that it’s somehow really all about his fear of democracy. But after China, the most important country to stand by Russia in this crisis is democratic India. The real world is just too complicated for that kind of pat narrative.
We’re also seeing analysis rooted in psychology, like Marco Rubio saying “something is off with Putin” or Mark Warner’s dark warning that Putin is “increasingly isolated, which is a dangerous place for the leader of a nuclear-armed nation to be.” And of course, this tends to veer into Hitler analogies, where everything is always 1938 and if Kyiv falls then next thing you know we’re fighting in Warsaw, Berlin, and Paris.
Knowing another person’s mind is always difficult. But if you read the speech Putin gave before initiating the war and the essay he published last summer titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” you get a different picture — especially if you consider his words in the Russian historical context. Because while Putin’s narrative about Ukraine is extremely irrational, I don’t think it indicates an irrational mind. Putin is espousing an irrational yet commonplace view that is widely held by Russian people and has been influential in Russian policy across various regimes and multiple centuries.
This view holds that Ukraine is an integral part of Russia and that Ukrainian national identity and the Ukrainian language are somehow fake. “Modern Ukraine,” Putin writes, “is entirely the product of the Soviet era,” dismissing all evidence to the contrary as foreign manipulation.
And we should take this narrative and its force seriously. Russian nationalists have a view about Ukraine that is grounded in some facts but is also totally bizarre. And Putin — and with him, the leadership class of Russia — is acting on the basis of this weird-but-longstanding ideological construct, the roots of which long predate the existence of the modern Russian state.
Turn back the clock 1,000 years
A thousand years ago, Kyiv was the capital of a state known as Kievan Rus’. Its inhabitants practiced Orthodox Christianity and spoke multiple dialects of a language we today call Old East Slavic. We don’t know what the Rus’ called their language or really all that much about the everyday speech in this area. But while Kievan Rus’ includes Kyiv and other parts of central Ukraine, it excludes large swathes of contemporary Ukraine and includes Belarus and much of European Russia. Moscow did not really exist at this time, but the old Russian city of Suzdal (which is beautiful) that you can see on the map is about 150 miles east of Moscow.
(Map by SeikoEn)
The name of the language of the Rus’ is itself the subject of politicized controversy. Ukrainian nationalists say that since Kyiv was the capital, the Kievan (or Kyivan) dialect was the standard and that contemporary Ukrainian descends from that standard dialect, so we should call the language Old Ukrainian. Russian nationalists say they spoke Rus-ian in Rus’, just as they speak Russian in Russia, so we should call it Old Russian.
What we think of today as Russia didn’t begin to take shape until the 15th century. The Kievan Rus’ polity grew increasingly decentralized in the preceding centuries, with various branches of the Rurik Dynasty ruling different principalities. Several Rurik princes remained in power even after the area was conquered by the Mongols in the 13th century. And it was during this period that the Ruriks who ruled in Moscow (having moved there from the Suzdal area before the Mongol invasion) grew increasingly prominent, anointing their ruler the Grand Princes of Moscow and playing the role of middlemen, exerting control over more and more of the old Rus’ area and kicking tribute up to the Golden Horde.
(Muscovy by 1505, map by David Liuzzo)
Then in 1480, Ivan III started refusing to pay tribute. He also adopted the title Tsar and married the niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, laying the institutional foundation of the Russian state that is still familiar to us 600 years later.
The area around Kyiv, meanwhile, ended up in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and then in the Poland-Lithuania Commonwealth. Crimea was largely populated by Turkic people at that time, and the Crimean Khanate extended well into parts of modern Ukraine. The Zaporizhian Host (Ukrainian Cossacks in what is today Central Ukraine) played the Turks and Poles against each other with some success and obtained autonomy, but were first allied with Russia and then taken over by Russia in the mid-18th century.
This was part of Russia’s aggressive expansion in the 17th and 18th centuries. The empire stretched from the Pacific Ocean and all around Central Asia, capturing a big part of Poland-Lithuania in 1772 and 1795 and grabbing Finland in 1809. It became a highly multi-ethnic state but was also distinctly Russian.
But because of the historical legacy of Kievan Rus’ and the similarity in the languages, the Russian state developed a peculiar attitude toward the Ukrainian minority, basically insisting that it didn’t exist at all.
Russia’s longstanding Ukraine denialism
Preliterate peoples don’t necessarily have a strong sense of a “standard language” in the way that modern ones do. Sometimes the people in one town speak a strikingly different language from the next town over, as when Francophone towns give way to Germanophone towns near the Rhine River. But more commonly, there’s a gradient with people in neighboring towns speaking pretty similarly and things getting increasingly different the further you go.
But literate societies typically demand a literary standard imposed through things like a school system and newspaper publishing, and by the mid 19th century, some Ukrainian writers were publishing work in a written form of the local vernacular.
In 1863, Russian authorities crushed a Polish insurgency called the January Uprising, which left them suspicious of the Ukrainian-language literary scene. People in what’s now Ukraine spoke a language that was different from — though similar to — standard Russian, but it was also similar to standard Polish, which Russian authorities construed as the result of corrupting Polish influence. In August of that year, the Interior Minister Pyotr Valuev put out a memo banning most Ukrainian publishing:
There has not been, is not, and cannot be any special Little Russian language, and that their dialect as used by the common folk is the very same Russian language, only corrupted by Poland’s influence on it; and that the Common Russian language is as comprehensible to Little Russians as it is to Great Russians, and even much more comprehensible than the so-called Ukrainian language composed for them by certain Little Russians and especially by Poles.
Some Ukrainian-language material was still being published in the Ukrainian-speaking province of Galicia under the Habsburg Empire (which, though repressive in its own way, did not have this particular hangup) and moved across the border until 1875, when Russian authorities banned the import of Ukrainian-language material. The text of the order doesn’t refer to the Ukrainian language but instead speaks of a prohibition on “all books and pamphlets in the Little Russian dialect” and also bans “all theatrical performances and lectures in the Little Russian dialect.”
And this, in a nutshell, is the basic weirdness of Russian nationalists’ attitude toward Ukraine. They want to suppress the local language (which is a fairly common imperialist thing to do), but they also keep insisting that there actually is no local language because Russia and Ukraine are the same nationality.
But though this attitude prevailed in Moscow for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, authorities did take the opposite view at a crucial moment.
Lenin’s Ukrainification of Ukraine
A common way for a centralizing state to promote a national standard language against regional ones is to create a public school system that teaches the national standard. This is especially effective in cases where the regional language is genuinely similar to the national standard, which means students will generally be good at learning the standard.
That’s how, for example, the inhabitants of France all came to speak French, eliminating the broad array of languages (Norman, Arpitan, Occitan) that once existed there. It’s why people in Scotland generally speak English rather than the related-but-different Scots language. It’s how residents of Italy learned to speak the Tuscan-derived standard Italian language, and it’s why the Plattdütsch that used to be widely spoken in Northern Germany is now marginal.
Ukrainian could have easily gone down that path. In 1897, as the Russian Empire was beginning to industrialize, fewer than 30 percent of the Tsar’s subjects could read or write. And because European economic development started in the west and then spread east, the first-to-industrialize part of the Empire was its westernmost part — i.e., eastern Ukraine. All around the world, newly industrializing cities grew rapidly and drew in lots of peasants from the countryside. In the case of the Russian Empire, that meant lots of Russian-speaking peasants from the rural east moved westward, changing the linguistic balance in cities but leaving the surrounding countryside Ukrainian-speaking.
After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks made a big push for mass literacy as a signature national project. One way this could have gone would have been a big push to teach kids growing up in Ukrainian-speaking households how to read and write in Standard Russian. Some of those kids would have stayed in the countryside in a state of diglossia, and others would have moved to the Russophone cities where they’d probably have adopted Russian as their everyday speech. Ukrainian would have become a downscale, stigmatized way of speaking and likely gone the way of Scots and Occitan and Plattdütsch and lots of other semi-dead European languages.
But Lenin had other ideas. He thought he was leading a worldwide communist revolution in which the Russian Soviet Federal Republic and Ukrainian Soviet Federal Republic would soon be joined by Hungarian and Polish and German and French SFRs. SFRs everywhere, SFRs for everyone. So rather than promoting Russification through early Bolshevik mass education, Lenin instituted a policy he called Korenizatsiya (nativization). As Liam Greenacre writes, “each minority was assigned its own national language, whether or not it had previously existed. Extensive cultural and language programmes were rolled out in this language.” Some of this involved making up new written standard forms for languages that never had them. But Ukrainian did have a literary standard and a corpus of works, and the Bolsheviks supported it robustly. Elena Shelestyuk finds that in 1913, there were 228 Ukrainian-language books in print amounting to 725,585 individual volumes. By 1927, that had ballooned to 2,418 books with a total circulation of 16.5 million volumes.
The timing of korenizatsiya intersected in an important way with the timing of industrialization and urbanization in Ukraine. At a critical period, instead of using mass education to Russify Ukrainian-speaking peasants, it was used to Ukrainianize Russophone city-dwellers.
The halfway house
Lenin might have settled this once and for all with everyone in the Ukrainian SFR speaking Standard Ukrainian and everyone on the Russian side of the border speaking Standard Russian. That’s how the somewhat mutually intelligible Swedish and Danish got sorted out — if you go to school in Copenhagen you learn Danish, and if you to school in Malmö you learn Swedish.
But Stalin rolled back parts of korenizatsiya in the 1930s and promoted strong Russification. Some scholars see this in biographical terms — Stalin was Georgian and thus felt he needed to be a Russian super-patriot — but there was also an ideological element. Compared to Lenin and Trotsky, Stalin was more comfortable with the idea that the USSR needed to be one state that operated in an international system of states and that as such, the USSR was basically a new version of the Russian Empire.
After World War II, Stalin cracked down on and purged various groups, but he also decisively rejected Lenin’s vision of for global expansion of the USSR. Postwar Romania, Hungary, Poland, etc. are Soviet satellite states, but they are officially independent countries and not incorporated as SFRs into the Union. That confirms the specifically Russian character of the USSR and leaves the non-Russian republics in an anomalous situation. If you’re in Poland, everything is in Polish. If you’re in Russia, everything is in Russian. But if you’re in Ukraine, some things are in Ukrainian, others are in Russian, and Ukrainian has a kind of second-class status.
Under Khruschev, Russia executed a sort of double move (described in Jeremy Smith’s “The Battle for Language: Opposition to Khrushchev's Education Reform in the Soviet Republics”). On the one hand, Khruschev was overall much less repressive and also had much less control over the state, so there was some decentralization of authority and more leeway for people to do what they want. But on the other hand, he further reversed korenizatsiya, creating Russian language primary schools in Ukraine for Russophone families.
And while you can see on the map above that Khruschev also shifted Crimea from Russia into Ukraine, this was a favor to the Ukrainian branch of the party (an important part of his power base), not a concession to Ukrainian national identity. On the contrary, the idea that you could just transfer a bunch of Russophone communities into a Ukrainian jurisdiction with no follow-up effort to Ukrainize them underscores the extent to which the postwar Soviet Union just continued the Tsarist policy of not taking Ukrainian national identity seriously.
Who cares about this?
The point of all this is that while Putin’s insistence that Ukrainian isn’t a real national identity is very strange when viewed from the outside, it’s not particularly eccentric. Lots of very psychologically normal people believe weird stuff that is widely held in the community they belong to, and “Ukraine isn’t real” is a longstanding precept of Russian and Soviet public policy.
And like a lot of nationalist myths, it’s founded on some grains of truth. Russia and Ukraine really do trace their legacies back to the same Rus’ polity and its ruling Rurik dynasty. The Russian and Ukrainian languages really are similar in a way that is comparable to the regional “dialects” in France, Italy, and Germany that were flattened into Standard French, Italian, and German. The decision to take the education system in the opposite direction really was an eccentric idea of Lenin’s that differed from both his predecessors and his successors and was tied to the messianic internationalism of his brand of communist ideology. It’s also true that Ukrainian nationalism has traditionally been useful to Russia’s geopolitical rivals — whether in the Poland-Lithuania Commonwealth, the Habsburg Empire, Germany,1 or today’s NATO.
Putin isn’t pursuing rational national security objectives. The people who say NATO expansion contributed to the downward spiral in U.S.-Russian relations and tensions between Russia and its neighbors are clearly correct. But Putin had already effectively come up with a strategy to block NATO expansion to Georgia and Ukraine by sponsoring separatist movements in places like Luhansk and South Ossetia. A full-blown invasion of Ukraine was completely pointless and has, in a very predictable way, led to more rather than fewer NATO forces in central Europe and a closer association between NATO and Finland.
But that doesn’t mean he’s “crazy” or that the trajectory of events here is necessarily “today Kyiv, tomorrow Paris” (which, as I think we’re seeing, he couldn’t come remotely close to pulling off ). He’s following a well-established ideology.
There really is something unhinged about looking at people who say they’re Ukrainians and saying “no, sorry, you’re actually Russians.” All the historical and linguistic analyses in the world can’t argue people out of the position that they have a distinct national and ethnic identity. None of these things are “real” anyway. Irish people and British people seem awfully similar to me, but if Boris Johnson decides to recolonize Ireland tomorrow, no sensible person is going to respond by saying “well there really is a lot of historical interconnection between Ireland and the UK.” It’s no way to exist in the modern world. But to understand what’s happening, I do think it’s useful to entertain the idea that this is what he really thinks.
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